When will a radical film tell the truth?

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Troops gather in an improvised arena as a helicopter flies in some show girls to a remote supplies camp in the Mekong Delta Hailed as the greatest war film of all time, Apocalypse Now is certainly a finely powerful portrayal of America's imperialist adventure in Vietnam.

With brutally vivid realism, director Francis Ford Coppola shows us a Vietnam war which is less a military operation than a grotesque carnival of the sick, surrealist, farcical : and psychotic.

A crazed colonel in a US • cavalry hat leads his helicopters into a bombing raid of a village to the taped sound of Wagner's 'Ride of the Walkyries' • and afterwards throws a beach party amidst the corpses.

Three go-go dancers, landed in, the jungle on an improvised stage, narrowly escape rape at the hands of a drooling audience of sex-starved GIs.

A whole US base marooned in the middle of nowhere goes collectively beserk, with triggerhappy soldiers sinking rapidly into "savagery.

'Savagery, indeed, is the ideological keynote of the film, and a deeply suspect one it is too.

~ Dark' continent Apocalyse Now is a modern version of Joseph Conrad's famous anti-imperialist tale Heart of Darkness, in which the narrator embarks on a grisly journey up the river Congo to encounter, at the heart of the 'dark' continent, the ghastly Mr. Kurtz.

Kurtz is a model Belgian colonialist who has succumbed to the lure of the 'primitive' and sunk into obscene, unspeakable rites, lording it as a local deity over his mesmerised natives.

- In this film, Kurtz (Marlon Brando) is a model US colonel whom the Vietnam war has driven beyond the brink of sanity into pure 'evil'.

Stuck somewheré up river with his worshipping colony of loin-clothed, spear-wielding former GIs, he wades between smoking altars in a sea of human. blood and reads aloud to. himself Ț.S. Eliot's gloomier poems.

Primitivist'

The ideological meaning of Conrad's tale is cléar: scratch a 'civilised' imperialist and you find a 'savage' beneath. This is in one sense anti-imperialist, in inother sense racist: "we" white men are as savage as "they" are.

Apocalypse Now isn't racist, but it shares deeply in the primitivist' mythology of Conrad's text.

Beneath the surface rationality of civilised society lurk dark, irrational forces which war-any war-releases; the Vietnam war was essentially a form of savage insanity.

This makes for compulsive viewing, but it is unfortunately untrue.

There was nothing in the least insane about Vietnam; whereas this film converts the logic of imperialism into surrealist nightmare.

Pointless

.. The same: happens in. Conrad! for him, the point of imperialism is that it is essentially … pointless -grotesquely, absurdly unreal, as elusive and enigmatic as the 'heart of darkness' which reduces Kurtz to a hollow phantom of a human being. (What's the significance of seeing Africa as 'dark' in any case?)

Certainly Vietnam drove men and women mad and was experienced as chaotic unrealmy, vur to poncal uctermal- iture hut the realitinal Antrumiai ants which caused it were wholly real and intelligible, which is why Apocalypse Now has to leave them completely out of account.

Despite that chaos, the cinema audience. is offered a continual point of security. There's no chance that we shall lose our bearings because the film provides us with'a character with whom we can consistently identify: the heroHailalus. Captain • Willard narrator, sheen), a CIA agent sent on a secret mission to assassinate Kurtz.

Willard • is hardly Enid Blyton's idea of a hero: he brutally shoots a, defenceless Vietnamese woman so that his mission won't be impeded.

But this, significantly, is about the one positiviely alienating action he performs in the entire film Athanice ha fimiroo: no figures blank, 'sane" spectator of the bloody farce, just as we are in the cinema.

Narrators in art always have something comforting about them, partly because they provide an "overview' of the situation, partly because the fact that they are telling the story in retrospect means that they must have come out alive.

Ambiguous

This, precisely, is the ideological function of Willard: to prevent the audience from being entirely "subverted' by the bestial fantasy it presents.

in this, willard ditters impor- TIT: 11 11:20 tantly from Conrad's narrator, Marlow.

At the centre of Conrad's eerie tale lies an uneasy, deeply ambiguous relationship between Marlow and Kurtz, one set in motion long before the two men meet: Marlow is in no sense safely 'outside' because of the perversely attractive effect which the idea of Kurtz has on him.

Kurtz's 'evil' finds a resonance inside him; so that as a character Marlow is called into question and can't be wholly trusted by the reader.

There is something of this in the Willard-Kurtz relationship, but not much. Willard grows increasingly fascinated with Kurtz as he travels up-river, but not to the point where we can critically distance our selves from him.

In the end (in one of the film's endings, anyway), he butchers the mad colonel and strides off back home, pushing his way through a mob of painted bodies in a set of images which transplant the political fact of Vietnam into some timeless, primeval zone light-years removed from this or any other century.

Monster

Where the film better, however, is handling of the hulking: headed Colonel Kurtz.

The point about (Conrad's too) isn't just is mad. Much more disti it is that he has deli pressed the butchery of to an extreme limit, as to reveal it for wha He has calculatedly himself into a mon: though to savagely ca and expose, the monst imperialism.

Conrad's Kurtz is perverse way a kind of least he has been cc enough to press th normally veiled by imp to its ruthless, unt] limit.

In Conrad, this has a acceeds in its shavenKurtz that he irbingly, iberately • the war i though t it is.

turned ster, as ricature, rosity of • in a hero: at insistent e logic serialism hinkable i dangerous element of romanticism: better to be, 'authentically' murderous than hypocritically so. Coppola mutes this element, and leaves us with a Kurtz considerably more complex than a mere lunatic:

When Coppola's Kurtz argues that human beings must learn to kill without compassion there is a real sense, for all the fact that he is a bloodstained agent of imperialism, in which he raises an issue of central relevance to revolutionaries.

The playwright Bertolt Brecht once shrewdly commented that you can't learn anything about capitalism by portraying a factory, on stage.

What he meant was that realism in art has severe limits: it makes events grippingly immediate, but at the same time can conceal their underlying structures, the forces which determine them.

This is certainly true of Apocalypse Now, which might wen convince someone tnat the Americans shouldn't have been in Vietnam, but is hardly likely to tell them why.

The film evades all political questions: its implicit answer to what causes the Americans' behaviour in Vietnam is, in two words, 'human nature' In this it has much in common with the disgusting Deerhunter, although unlike that film it doesn't go to the lengths of actually glorifying 'Nature' We are still waiting for a Tadical' film about Vietnam to tell the truth.,

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(ow on general release) has triggered a range of critical assessments in the ted to Socialist Press. The importance of the film and the questions that ive seen it have persuaded us to take the unusual step of publishing these Francis Coppola (right), discusses a scene with Marlon Brando.

nately an apology for US invasion lichardson and Duncan Bush. Terusalem Bible describes a Revelation as being "richly tym bolic and so allusive that the imessage can be interpreted in more ways than one.' * They vere designed to raise the morale of the persecuted Christrans..-.

Coppola's message in Apocałypse Now. can : also certainly be interpreted in more than one way. In fact he himself has made three alternative endings to the film.

In part this reflects the nanging political pressures on Coppola himselt, since the tim vas planned 10 years ago, while the Vietnam war was near its peak-and took five years to Techniques.

Indeed most people who see the film will respond most immediately to the sheer size and technical artistry of the scenes of the journey down the tiver to Cambodia.

While most large, multi-million dollar productions today are space epics, Coppola has used vast resources ($30 million) land modern techniques portray the brutal realities of war.

But while the visual impact of the film alone makes it worth seeing, it is important to look more closely at Coppola's Coppola's film Apocalypse Now have to be seen.

The task of eliminating Colonel Kurtz is entrusted to Willard, a war-shocked captain, whose narrative voice is analagous to that of Conrad's anecdotal Marlow, yet whose bonsciousness of events-or, at least, of their implications-is always ambiguous, passive and tess than total.

This lack of a firm perspecre, which can be said to cen calise the "moral" questions at Coppola attempts to pose.

m also be identified in another ace aspect to the film, and time a cinematic, or styl.

c one: that is, in what can be med the filn's "hallucino "ic vision"

Thus, from the moment ca Willard sits in a Saigon had room hearing the whirring of the electric fan as an Army «copter's rotor blades, to the when he finally •bles upon Kurtz amid his may of doped-out Montagnards journey up-river into Cambodia is a bad trip in more cres than one.

This is underlined throughI: 5 the sinister brilliance of Te Coppola soundtrack and the Iisi 3i The Doors and Jimi Shot stunes all hu the Wednesday message.

Though ostensibly about Vietnam, the film is meant to relate-in more general terms to the "civilised encountering the primitive".

And, while Coppola himself has a record of opposing the US intervention in Vietnam, this very theme implies a hint of racialism.

The war is portrayed in terms of the moral collapse and decay of US imperialism. From this angle, it is US imperialism Which loses the war, rather than 'the Vietnamese who, by their sacrifice and struggle, actually win it.

Coppola's " statement that "Apocalypse 2" would have to be made by the. Vietnamese also shows his complete failure to recognise that it was the Vietnamese people who actually created Apocalypse Now, by defeating the imperialist armies!

Far from being "primitives", the Vietnamese workers, peasants and soldiers were playing the most progressive role open to them: they were struggling, arms in hand, to defeat US imperialism, which, as the mainstay of a crisis ridden capitalist system, stands as the major roadblock on the historic development - of. mankind through the expansion of the productive forces.

But Coppola is blind hallucinatory or surreal sugges tions to the filn's visual imagination, its sheer cinematic virtuosity.

Vietnam was a war where a large number of American combatanis Pere under the influcace of drags for a consid crable proportion of the tise Coppoles atonica a ja fact allows lin a ture is sense of the sas air! variousty seans dias batitself, and a tem and stumine ben i ten explosions or rigs tana Underpinnin It is in thes to rect structural and sytistic speco that the file scars, 10 Inc. Is impressively saccessful.

vas obriousty reppired i se film BOT TO entirely is the artists dad gratuitoesness of war indi. ot the one baad, ad of perce delic visions And Ca cads political questions-even though the fleet of helicopters which he used for the film, on loan from the Phillipines Air Force, were repeatedly having to be taken back, resprayed, and used on active service to repress guerrilla forces opposing the Marcos dictatorship!

For all Coppola's inability to assess the historic role of the Vietnamese people, however, he has not lapsed to the racialist depths as that diabolical film The Deerhunter.

Rather he sees the Vietnam war simply as a moral question, and attempts to expose its hypocrisy.

CIA 'hit-man'

The contradiction is revealed in the film's hero-CIA 'hit man' Captain Willard. He is first seen drunk. Having been on leave, he cannot wait to get back into action: yet while in the jungle, he dreams of home.

The very way of life of an assassin rules out "normal" values. How can you take a "normal break" between murders? And if this is true of Willard as an individual hit man, is it not also true of other imperialist soldiers?

Willard's assignment is to assassinate the renegade Colonel Kurtz who has gone up-river with a gang of ex-GIs and native Heart of Darkness, while never insisted upon-except by the critics-can be thought to provide a sub-text of fairly direct and accessible implica. tions for Coppola, a sple thread which world kead him in penalt ET-™ 700 -Be TORC B0 TE KITC donoi 5 bret I DOs TiDO TO TEE • so to pois ore cola Bota LOng forces to form his own private army.

What angers the US Chief of Staff is not Kurtz's continuous killings, or even his obvious insanity. Rather it is the fact that his operation is outside US military control: Others, equally as insane as Kurtz, are free to play a leading role in the frame work of the imperialist forces.

Lt. Colonel Kilgore, for Robert, url, leads his hey copter squadron like a cavalry troupe-complete with cavalry hat!

Kilgore says he loves the smell of napalm as "the smell of victory" and talks of the time he napalmed a whole mountain, leaving not a living thing behind. Yet Kilgore is a part of the "legitimate" US force. It is his fellow fanatic Kurtz who is outside of its control, and therefore to be eliminated This hypocritical division is taken up repeatedly. When the crew of Willard's boat massacre the family on a junk, wrongly thinking them to be NLF, a woman is left alive. The crew decide to take her for treatment.

This double-standard is too much for Willard, who kills the woman, and attacks those prepared to "cut 'em in half vith a machine gun, and then rive them a band-aid"

Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance-books which Col. Kurtz possesses and which deal with Varous mythologies concerned with the "fisherking", an ancient and recurring fertility-cal invotrise the sacriEre of aa sid, sick and impotem Je 3C3 DI I ONE DUE I IC TH scEne DE CODE IT Eit 3 to it Loa Хут speaks of a mond sot one of processdai is of a continuine dialec.

tical struzzle which is constantI changing the conditions of that struzzle for itself as it proceeds but one of fixed and inmutable essences, of given and static postures, like those of tbe figures on an ancient vase.

Meanwhile Willard discovers that Kurtz had a brilliant record prior to his assignment to covert operations (Nixon's whole war in Cambodia was a covert operation concealed from the US people).

And he hears that a previous agent who had been sent to kill Kurtz had ended up joining him!

Anti-climax

Kurtz, in other words, along with his private army, had stepped over the bounds of the "permissible" in war, and made no secret of their barbarism.

Following all this, Willard's eventual encounter with Kurtz has been widely and correctly described as an anti-climax.

This is partly because of the problem of portraying the actions of Kurtz's private army as more barbaric than those of the US imperialist forces already depicted.

Coppola attempts to get around this with a set involving hanging bodies and severed heads and careful lighting of Kurtz himself. But it all appears stagey and false compared to earlier scenes.

The second problem however is the hardest: what is to happen at the end?

The conclusion that I saw was Coppola's "humane ending"

Myth, historically speaking, represented history for those societies in which real historyhistory as process-had not yet begun: a beginning that is marked by the breakdown of fixed tradition, the closures on «hich myth subsists: that is, the world of previousty given social Qui LitoT omhy bozins. in Je mateDE s s axblisn.

Ie:: Jn JADES TIET= TERES X izs FAJITI My a pres coppoia a say 0f fining his fis off, a way out di the problematic it creates, but is represents a final comproIDE.

Apologist

Thimately its message is apologist for the American invasion of SE Asia, and the crimes that were committed in that cause, in that it exonerates the politics of capitalism and casts the problem of human violence in the mythic, pessimistic and eternal light of its own "innate" inevitability.

Yet Coppola's difficulty was real, for how can you find an appropriate conclusion to work of art that purports to -in which Willard Kurtz kills and goes back.

Another version has him kill Kurtz and take over; in the third version he has Kurtz's followers napalmed.

But: in any event the encounter with Kurtz suffers from the fact that Kurtz's state ment of position amounts to a repeat of many things already said in the film.

Indeed Kurtz • echoe! Coppola's political weaknes when he tongs for an army with the strength of the Vietnamese liberation forces.

This ignores the fact that while US troops were forcibly drafted into the war, or simply the hired mercenaries of imper. ialist oppression, the Vietnam ese fought with the tenacity of an exploited people battling te liberate their homeland. • This material, difference was th driving force behind the Viet namese, which brought their historic victory in the spring of 1975.

This is why the Vietnamese war can only be understood if it is seen as a class question, and not a question of morality.

For this reason only revolutionary could produce ar adequate conclusion tc Coppola's in many ways magnif icent film.

By Tony Richardson deal with a subject that is still not finished for America itself (let alone for Cambodia, or Vietnam, about which few American films show much concern)?

How can you neatly round off something that was a national experience as well as an individual one, and that still persists in the nightmares and disabilities of those victims who survived close contact with the Tzr, and in the grief and agonies of uselessness of those who were bereaved by it? 'Myth gives the whole sordid, botched, mismanaged, genocidal inconclusive mess that was American aggression in Vietnam and Cambodia, if not stature (it is still too close to us in the sense of real, lived history for that myth to hold up) then certainly in his film,. a final staginess, a literary "twist" that hides the bankrupt and megalomanic politics and geopolitics that lay behind American involvement, as well as the continuing private suffering, for which it was all fought. Myth makes appear "destined" something that need, and should, never have been.

By Duncan Bush

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Wednesday 1980